At 84, Marlin Olsen has been coaching football for over 50 years

They say age is just a number. Marlin Olsen turned 84 a couple of weeks ago, and that's the number he's shooting for ... on the golf course.

"I've shot my age every year since I turned 80," said Olsen, a longtime Marin resident who plays three days a week at Adobe Creek Golf Club in Petaluma where he now lives. "I haven't done it yet this year, but I've been close."

And you get the feeling he's going to do it, too, especially after he opted to play from the forward tees ("It's a survival technique," he said). Because once Marlin Olsen decides to do something, he doesn't do it by half measures.

Take his life's passion. For the past 50-plus years — it's more than 60 if you include stints in his native Los Angeles and the Central Valley — Olsen has been simply "coach" to several generations of North Bay high school and junior college football players.

"I've been coaching for 19 years, and he's probably forgotten more (about coaching) than I know," said Trent Herzog, the head football coach at Casa Grande High, where Olsen serves as an assistant coach of the freshman squad. "It's something he loves to do. He's still vibrant; he still has it. The game has not passed him by."

"I've never stopped coaching," Olsen said. "And I have no thoughts about quitting. My wife used to ask me that all the time, when was I going to quit coaching. But she stopped doing that a couple of months ago because I kept telling her to forget about it, I'm not quitting.

"Oh, maybe I would quit if I lost an arm or a leg. But then again, I'd probably still try to keep on coaching."

Olsen's passion for teaching the finer parts of the game — any game — was not lost on his three children, who are now around the mid-century mark in years and have found careers themselves in coaching: Oldest child Russ Olsen runs a lacrosse camp in San Diego, middle child Crissy Quebatay is a dance and gymnastics coach in Honolulu and the youngest, Ann Bode, owns a dance studio in Arizona.

"Give him a team, in any sport, and he will coach it," Bode said via e-mail. "This amazing man that I have always known as 'coach' ... instilled a real sense of purpose in me."

Olsen got a taste for coaching when he was in high school in the Inglewood area of Los Angeles. As a 5-foot-8, 140-pound offensive lineman and sometime nose guard, he knew his options for playing the game were going to be limited (because of his weight, or lack thereof, he played mostly on the JV squads in high school and junior college), so he became a student of the game, helping out the coaching staff at his high school alma mater while he picked up a degree in counseling at UCLA.

In 1955, he got his first head coaching job at a high school near Bakersfield, and for the next four years honed his craft in the hot sun of the southern San Joaquin Valley.

But when the vice principal at a school he had coached at got a similar position at Novato High in 1959 and asked Olsen if he wanted to run the school's football program, Olsen jumped at the chance.

"Of course I said yes," Olsen said. "I wanted to get out of the valley because of the heat. Four years was enough."

For six years, he coached the Hornets, whose roster included defensive end Marty Bacagglio, who would go on to play pro ball in Cincinnati and San Diego. Then came the toughest decision in his life: Should he follow his bliss or his education? He chose the latter.

"In 1966, a job opened up at College of Marin for a counselor, which was what I got my degree in," he said. "I took the job, and moved to Kentfield, but because I was no longer IN the (school) district, I couldn't coach at Novato. And because I wasn't in the PE department, I couldn't coach at COM.

"That was a low point, but I got on with my career as a counselor. And undoubtedly, I've had no second thoughts."

Although his head-coaching career may have come to an abrupt halt, he found several opportunities to become an assistant at a variety of high schools, including Marin Catholic, San Rafael, Novato again (where he helped out a young QB by the name of Mike Moroski, who went on to play eight seasons in the NFL, including one with the 49ers) and College of Marin. And for all this stick-to-it-tiveness, he eventually found his way into the Marin Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame, where he was enshrined in 2002.

"It takes some time to find out what you can and cannot do," Olsen said. "It didn't bother me that I was coaching the JV or freshman squads. I just wanted to coach."

Although he officially retired from his "real" job at College of Marin in 2000, he's hardly been part of the leisure class in the intervening years. He still commutes to the Kentfield campus once a week to teach a class. And then there's the Casa Grande kids. And golf.

"Having something to do on a regular basis keeps you mentally and psychologically sound," Olsen said. "I have something to look forward to each week."